MiniPx
Add to ChromePricingBlogAccount
No. 08 — AI Tools · Cloud HDPro · on our GPU

Power lines, out, the sky closes up.

A cable is two pixels wide with sky on either side of it, which makes it the single friendliest thing you can hand an inpainting model. Paint a band along the wire and the sky closes over it as if the line had never been strung.

Pro · Cloud HDDeleted on completionUp to 25 MB · 24 MP
Remove cables and wiresCloud HD · our GPU

Pro to remove objects →

How it works

  1. Pick the shot — JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 25 MB and 24 megapixels.
  2. Paint a band along each cable, wider than the wire itself, running off the frame edge at both ends. Add the pole and insulators to the same mask.
  3. PowerPaint continues the sky and returns a PNG at your original resolution. All the strokes count as a single HD run — one of 10 a month.

This page is the object remover, tuned to the thin-mask case that inpainting handles best.

All Image Tools

AI Tools

Pro Tools

Compress

Convert

Resize

Compress to Size

Compress for Platform

Tools & Utilities

By Device

Compare

Solutions by use case

For Developers & Web

For Sellers & Ecommerce

For Job Applicants & Govt Forms

For Creators & Social

For Work & Documents

Remove Power Lines from a Photo — Pro, on our server

Thin masks are where this model is genuinely excellent, and it is worth knowing why. Inpainting reconstructs a covered region from the evidence immediately around it, so the quality of any result comes down to a ratio: how much of the hole can be explained by its own edges. A person standing in a doorway hides a region far wider than anything adjacent can account for. A telephone cable hides a strip narrower than the brush that covers it, with continuous sky flanking every millimetre. Nothing has to be invented — the gradient simply carries across. This is why cable removal, along with scratch removal on a scan and lettering removal, belongs to a class of jobs where the honest answer is that you will not be able to find the edit afterwards.

Be generous with the brush, and follow the sag. The mistake that costs people a run is a mask cut tight to the wire. Every cable photographed against a bright sky carries a soft dark fringe from lens blur and sensor response, and that fringe is what the fill will average towards if you leave it. Use a brush noticeably wider than the line, follow the catenary curve loosely rather than tracing it, and carry the stroke off the edge of the frame at both ends so no stub of wire survives at the border. Do the same for the small hardware people forget: insulators, guy wires, a stay running down to an anchor, and the thin aerial or satellite arm on a roofline.

The crossings are the only part worth inspecting. Wherever a cable passes over open sky, the result needs no checking. Wherever it passes over a roof ridge, a chimney, a tree canopy or the horizon line, the model changes task from continuing a gradient to reconstructing structure, and a tile course or a branch can arrive on the far side a pixel or two out of true. Follow each cable across the finished image at full size and look only at those crossings. If one has gone wrong, paint over that short section on the returned file and run again — a small, isolated mask over a mostly-correct image is a much easier problem than the original frame.

Poles, property photography, and the terms. The pole itself is not a thin mask; it is a tall solid object crossing sky, roofline and verge, and it behaves like the large removals covered on the unwanted objects page. For exterior listing photography, cables and poles are usually removed alongside bins and parked cars, which is the workflow described under car removal and the main object remover. All of it is Cloud HD: Pro-only, opt-in, run on our GPU in the United States because PowerPaint cannot run in a browser, with your photo and mask encrypted in transit, deleted when the run finishes and in all cases within 24 hours, and never used to train anything. Pro allows 150 runs a month on Monthly and 200 on Annual, of which 10 may be HD.

How it works

  1. Open the power line remover: Go to minipx.com/remove-power-lines-from-photo, signed in to Pro.
  2. Upload the landscape or exterior: JPEG, PNG or WebP up to 25 MB and 24 megapixels, encrypted in transit and used only for this run.
  3. Paint a band along every cable: Use a brush a little wider than the wire, follow the sag, run off the frame edge at both ends, and add the pole and insulators to the same mask.
  4. Run once and inspect the crossings: Download the PNG at full resolution and check where each cable crossed a roof, a tree or the horizon rather than open sky.

Frequently asked questions

Why are overhead cables the ideal case for this model?
Because a wire is two or three pixels wide with sky on both sides of every point along it. Inpainting fills a gap from what surrounds it, and no gap is better surrounded than a cable in open sky. There is nothing to align, no structure to carry across, and one continuous gradient to continue — which is why wires disappear more completely than almost anything else you can paint.
Should I follow the wire exactly or paint a broad band along it?
A band, comfortably wider than the cable. Following it precisely leaves the soft dark fringe of the wire behind and the fill blends towards it, giving a faint grey streak where the line was. A band twice the cable width with the sag followed loosely reads as pure sky. Painting past the frame edge at each end is fine and avoids a stub at the border.
What about the pole or pylon the cables hang from?
That is a different job on the same page. A pole is a tall solid object crossing several surfaces — sky at the top, roofline in the middle, hedge or verge at the bottom — so it behaves like any other large removal rather than like a wire. It is usually worth doing, but expect to check the join where it crossed the horizon rather than trusting it unseen.
What happens where a cable crosses a roof, a tree or a building?
The portion over sky closes invisibly and the portion over detail is the part to inspect. Against tiles, brick courses, window frames or dense canopy the model has to rebuild texture rather than continue a gradient, and a short section of ridge line can come back a pixel out. Mask the whole cable anyway — a wire that stops mid-roof is more obvious than a soft patch.
A dozen wires cross this frame. Is that a dozen runs?
No. Every stroke you make goes into a single mask and the whole mask is processed as one run, so paint all the cables, the guy wires, the insulators and the pole in one sitting. Work at high zoom on the thin ones — a cable can be almost invisible on a phone screen and perfectly obvious in a print, which is where people notice a half-removed line.
Where does the picture go while this is happening?
Cable removal is Cloud HD, the Pro-only opt-in path: the photo and your mask travel encrypted to our GPU in the United States, are used for that single run, and are deleted when the run finishes and in all cases within 24 hours. They are never used to train anything. Pro includes 10 HD runs a month and a failed run costs nothing.